Research Projects

Unmanned Aerial Vehicles (UAVs), or drones, offer significant advantages in wireless communications due to their flexibility, mobility, agility, and autonomy. They are increasingly being used in various applications in wireless communications, including search-and-rescue missions, disaster relief, enhancing wireless coverage in remote areas, capacity enhancement in stadiums, etc. By acting as aerial base stations, multiple UAVs can form a multi-UAV Network, which provides communication services to ground users (or wireless devices) in an area under consideration. However, several challenges must be addressed to design such multi-UAV network. First, for a multi-UAV network to function effectively, it must ensure a reliable end-to-end connectivity, allowing ground users to communicate with each other or with remote servers. However, maintaining this connectivity is challenging, as UAVs may leave the network or fail due to hardware or software malfunctions, unstable wireless connections, limited transmission power, or battery limitations. Second, due to the limitation of resources (i.e., battery power and processing capability) of UAVs, such multi-UAV networks must ensure efficient resource awareness to maintain the sustainability of the multi-UAV network. Third, each UAV in the multi-UAV network should be able to make some decisions independently in a distributed manner unlike the centralized manner, which suffers from single-point failure, to ensure efficient coordination among them. Especially when some UAVs fail down then how the task of those UAVs will be shared among the other UAVs in the multi-UAV network, to ensure reliable connectivity to the ground users? Fourth, the number of UAVs required to form a multi-UAV network for a given area must be minimized in order to reduce the investment cost for network providers. Note that, even with a large number of UAVs, if the area under consideration is big, its number becomes insufficient. Therefore, the limited availability of UAVs needs to be taken into consideration. Such issues are largely unaddressed in the state-of-the-art while considering the design of such resource-aware and resilient multi-UAV networks in a distributed environment. To address such challenges, our aim in this project is to design a bio-inspired resource-aware framework that will enhance the resiliency of the multi-UAV network in a distributed environment. The framework will incorporate the properties of biological robustness of a well studied gene network, Transcriptional Regulatory Networks (TRNs). Such TRNs have several intrinsic topological properties such as abundance of motifs, scale-free out degree, low graph density, small world property, etc. Our framework will utilize such biological properties to ensure robustness of the multi-UAV network, that will be resilient against UAV node failures, and a resource-aware coordination among UAVs to provide reliable coverage to the ground users in a distributed manner.